ACORN successor denies Occupy link

By BEN SMITH

11/07/2011 05:52 PM EST

I'll have a bit more on this shortly, but the group New York Communities for Change, which is the local splinter of what used to be the national community organizing group ACORN, sends over a statement in response to Rep. Darrell Issa's demand that they be investigated for "fraud." A Fox News source had alleged they sent money raised for other purposes to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Let's be clear on the facts: no one at NYCC had anything to do with the conceiving, founding or funding of Occupy Wall Street. We work on a daily basis to fight against illegal foreclosures and to keep the Millionaires Tax in place, so that $5 billion in social services don't get gutted for the poor. We are allies and work with Occupy Wall Street on occasion and we certainly understand, at the deepest level, its call for economic justice for the 99 Percent of Americans struggling to survive. We know it's hard for billionaires such as Rupert Murdoch and the 1 percent to comprehend how a movement like Occupy came into fruition, but we doubt Murdoch or Roger Ailes have ever been in a similar position as the millions of American families who are out of work and fed up with our political process.

Now FOX is wasting American taxpayer money pursuing this even further. FOX and Murdoch -- the man who allowed his staff to hack into the private lives of people all over the world -- have enlisted Wall Street's chief political benefactor, biggest defender and multi-millionaire, Republican hatchet man Darrell Issa - to further the network's One percent political agenda. — Issa, who famously declared that he wanted to hold a hearing a week for forty weeks when he took over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has largely come up empty and is now scraping the bottom of the barrel, wasting Americans taxpayer money chasing baseless rumors fed to him by Rupert Murdoch. It's unfortunate but we expect nothing less from Issa, Murdoch and FOX.